Edward Knight Collins
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Edward Knight Collins I (5 August 1802 – 22 January 1878) was an American shipping magnate.[1]
Early life
He was born on August 5, 1802 in Truro, Massachusetts to Israel Gross Collins (1776–1831) and Mary Ann Knight (c.1780-c.1802). His mother was a niece of Sir Edward Knight and she died shortly after Edward was born. His aunts then raised him. His father moved to New York City. At age thirteen in 1815, Collins left Truro for New Jersey to attend school. He then went to New York City as an apprentice clerk in the counting house of McCrea and Slidell. Within a few years, Edward moved to Delaplaine and Company.[1]
Shipping career
In 1821 he joined his father's company and in January 1824 he became a partner in I. G. Collins & Son. In 1827 they started the first regularly scheduled packet service between New York City and Veracruz, Mexico. In 1826, Collins married Mary Ann Woodruff, the daughter of Thomas T. Woodruff. They had a son, Edward K. Collins II, as well as a daughter and at least one other child.[1]
After his father's death in 1831 he became involved with the cotton trade between New Orleans and New York. He bought his first shipping line in 1831. In 1836, he launched the Dramatic Line. He received a government subsidy in 1847 and formed the New York and Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company (the "Collins Line") to compete with the Cunard Line for transatlantic shipping. The subsidy was canceled in 1856 after two of the line's five steamships sank. In 1854 the Arctic sank while carrying his wife and two of his children.[2] Less than two years later the Pacific disappeared without a trace after leaving Liverpool.
Later life
Collins moved to his summer home, "Collinwood" in Wellsville, Ohio, where he engaged in coal mining and oil drilling. He remarried, to Sarah Browne, and by 1862 he had moved back to New York City, where he died on January 22, 1878. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx.
